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Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source"
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jun 25, 2008 07:14 AM
from the we-know-we-know dept.
from the we-know-we-know dept.
An anonymous reader sends along a video from Builder AU, in which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps describes 2001-2002 as 'a period where Sun 'screwed up' in their dealings with the open source community. Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
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Developers: Sun's Java Will Be Free This Year 274 comments
Ian Whyde notes that Sun is finally coming to the end of its struggle to open up Java completely. Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, said: "There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn't want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they've said 'yes, you can open source the code'... The only element that's left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that's involved there just isn't going to play ball and we're rewriting the code from scratch. That's going to be done within the next couple of months." In another sense the milestone of a free Java was reached this week when IcedTea passed the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit.
Submission: We screwed up on open source says Sun by Anonymous Coward
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Never too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you Sun for all the great products that you have open sourced. Unlike your competitors, you have outsourced your crown jewels.
Re:Never too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Never too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Never too late (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.opensuse.org/Novell_Supported_Projects [opensuse.org] for a list
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Re:Never too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun was in the same boat, however, they took the effort, time and expense to make arrangements to allow them to opensource it, regardless.
They are even taking the time to re-write things that they cannot get agreements with.
Novell, on the other hand, has not done this - or at least, not to this extent.
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Re:Never too late (Score:5, Funny)
you're saying that has a high percentage of Latter Day Saints among its employees? Or are you being ironic?
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Re:Never too late (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Never too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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Our Fiendish Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.
But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.
Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.
Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several [sun.com] of [sun.com] them [sun.com].) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.
There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.
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GPL zfs (Score:5, Interesting)
Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!
Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
> GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!
Prepare to be surprised.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Informative)
I think anyone who has attempted to legally link proprietary drivers, video codecs with the Linux kernel would understand some of GPL's limitations. The fact that GPL can take from so many licenses (without necessarily exporting) doesn't automagically make it the best license.
CDDL is based on MPL which has an explicit patent protection clause (bring a patent suit against another CDDL licensee and you lose all CDDL rights)
The fact that (besides Java), Sun hasn't released much GPL code should not cause us to ignore significant contributions by Sun to the opensource community. According to a E.U. study on The economic impacts of free and opensource software [europa.eu], Sun contributed 312 million Euro's worth of FOSS which amounts to over 51000 person months. This was 44% of all corporate contributions to FOSS. The next highest contributor was IBM with 13% then Red Hat with 8%. The rest SuSE, Netscape, AT&T... don't even add up to Sun's contribution. And this study came out before Java was GPL'd.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can have $3 billion dollars, you just have to cut your arms and legs off before you can spend a single penny.
The point is; Linux is the most used open source operating system and Sun licensing it under the CDDL is like dangling a carrot out, but saying only one in ever ten people can have a bite.
If the GPL is good enough for Java why isn't it good enough for ZFS? I'll tell you why. Sun's Java was on a road it couldnt' correct so it gave to the GPL community to keep it afloat. ZFS doesn't actually hav
Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
licensing it under the CDDL is like dangling a carrot out, but saying only one in ever ten people can have a bite.
Actually, it's like saying that only 9.5 out of every 10 people can have a bite... among all the OSes out there, I think only Linux has problems, and that's a tiny fraction of the desktop OSes out there.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that GPL needs to have everything that touches it be opened makes it very difficult to use it in proprietary environments. By using CDDL and allowing ZFS to be in freebsd, I could now use freebsd to create a proprietary network storage device using freebsd as the OS, zfs as the file system, and not have to release any source if I don't want to. That's pretty powerful.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Informative)
Not really sure what you mean here. I was rather surprised when I decided to do some Solaris development that the primary focus has moved from Solaris/SPARC to Solaris/x86. Half the cool stuff in OpenSolaris is designed around the x86 platform.
Similarly, the primary focus of the Java codebase is the x86 platform first, remaining platforms later.
Sun is also a massive seller of AMD64 [sun.com] and Intel Xeon [sun.com] based servers and workstations [sun.com]. Amazingly, Sun's prices have even come out of the stratosphere and are extremely competitive with other manufacturers like Dell.
Sun is even working to virtualize these "commodity platforms" with their surprisingly good OpenxVM project [openxvm.org]. I actually passed on a free copy of Parallels because Sun's VirtualBox [virtualbox.org] was working so well for me.
I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron, but the truth is that they're fairly well in tune with their customers and are working hard to provide them with the products and services they need. Along the way, the Open Source community is benefiting greatly.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The GP was asking for ZFS to be released under the GPL. It already is open-sourced, just under the CDDL which is, unfortunately, incompatible with the de-facto standard copyleft license, the GPL.
So, er, what file system is Sun selling then? ;)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Interesting)
ZFS is already opensourced and available to all Operating systems with CDDL compatible licences. It is already available in BSD, OSX, OpenSolaris (All distributions including Nexenta,OpenSolaris2008.05,Nevada,Belenix,Schillix,Martux,Milax)
ZFS read is already in OSX 10.5 and I've installed the beta ZFS write in Mac OSX 10.5, created a pool on a USB keychain, imported that pool into OpenSolaris2008.05 (which automagically mounted it). Put stuff on it, snapshotted it, exported it and reimported it into OSX. This is the filesystem of the future. The fact that GPL isn't compatible with ZFS is Linus's problem. Good luck with that FUSE module.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:4, Insightful)
ZFS and Sun need Linux more than Linux needs ZFS or Sun.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun already has most of the useful stuff in the upper part of the GNU/Linux stack because most of it is licensed under BSD/MPL/Apache... licenses which are all compatible with CDDL and run well on OpenSolaris (see openSolaris2008.05 and Nexenta for examples.)
The tiny part of "Linux" which can't be easily used on OpenSolaris, the real Linux almost no one thinks about when they're talking about RedHat, Novell... is Linus's kernel, the filesystem, drivers and a few other bits. What the #^~@% would Sun do with another kernel? The kernel in OpenSolaris has scalability, security and observability features that are only being dreamed about in Linus's kernel. But more importantly, the OpenSolaris kernel has stable APIs and ABIs so you won't have to rebuild and requalify all of your business logic the next time Linus adds a kernel module to support this week's latest X86 (&@?ware.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
What Linux has that Sun needs is a thriving community.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Informative)
No, here [opensolaris.org] is why GPL was not chosen:
The other reason for the creation of the CDDL has to do with software patents:
The reasons that the GPL is incompatible with the CDDL are very complicated and nuanced but in large part have to do with the patent clauses. It is clear why a company such as Sun needs such clauses. So if it were not for the stupidity of the existence of software patents a CDDL-like license could have been created that would have been compatible with the GPL minus some other niggles. Because of the existence of software patents and the need for such clauses the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. It is too bad about the GPL being so restrictive about adding clauses that protect the copyright holders.
Really the spirit should have been that if CDDL source is used in another project that this project needs to be open, but then all sorts of real world complications get in the way. That is basically the spirit of the GPL as well. Sun was against anything BSD-like where another company could take their source and create a closed source product.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the GPL is manifestly less free than the CDDL and contributions licensed under the GPL could not be folded back into the CDDL version?
And don't try to say "well, they could stipulate that all submissions have to be dual-licensed"--you and I both know we'd see some stupid little gnuZFS the same day as ZFS was GPL'd, just to get around that.
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Re:GPL zfs (Score:4, Insightful)
Linus Torvalds always struck me as a pragmatist, and Linux kernel development is backed by a number of groups with a genuine commercial interest in improving Linux with the inclusion of good technologies like ZFS. In the light of these facts, I would be very surprised (not to mention disappointed) if a dual license prevented the inclusion of ZFS in Linux.
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2001-2002? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about the other years? or is 2001-2002 the period they screwed up the worst ?
Re:2001-2002? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, I'd say 2008 is shaping up quite nicely to be one of the worst years in their history. The huge revenue miss in Q3, combined with the total lack of organic revenue growth, the continued exodus of top execs, and the pending layoff of up to 3000 employees doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Sun.
Ponytail-guy and his pals have basically given away the crown jewels and have not been able to "monetize" any sort of decent return for their efforts. The company can't sell servers, gives away software, and keeps purging the budget of the services and marketing teams that are the only pathway left for revenue growth. Geniuses.
I love Sun, I love their software, and they even have some really impressive hardware, but the management team there is absolutely clueless about how or where to take the company. The bets they made on open source and other areas are clearly not paying off. The stock is as low as it has ever been over the past 8 years and is showing no signs of life.
It is utterly depressing to see such a great company go down like this.
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Re:2001-2002? (Score:5, Interesting)
the continued exodus of top execs
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:2001-2002? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun created Java, which (love it or hate it) is still being taught as part of the core curriculum in many computer science programs. And SunOS/Solaris and its many associated technologies are being integrated into many places (PAM, DTrace, ZFS, and so on). If you have experience with any of Sun's technologies, you know they're not perfect, but they're damn well thought out, and they make many parts of your daily work easier.
I hope Sun weathers these changes-- they're one example of a company that saw a coming shift in the business of selling computers and software, and instead of lobbying the government to prop up their failing business model, instead changed their business model. There's plenty left for Sun to fix in their company-- e.g., have they opened up their hardware documentation yet? (we would probably buy Sun hardware if we could run other OSes, fully-supported on it). But it would be a shame to see such an innovator go the way of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc, etc, etc...
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Re:2001-2002? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun has tens of thousands of employees, many exclusively engaged in software development. They've had many rounds of layoffs before and since 2001. They looked at Linux vendors such as Red Hat and saw they were much smaller. Have you ever had to meet a payroll? It's easy to sit back and say, this company should do this, should've done that, they should get a new business model.
The wrong decision can sink a company. Look at Sybase - they were one of the hottest RDBMS vendors in the late '80s. Then they ran into a cash shortfall and had to make a source code licensing deal with Microsoft. Now Microsoft has the majority of the SQL Server business that Sybase once had, even though Sybase still has joint ownership of the source code. Yes, there are plenty of nice people out there willing to roll up their sleeves and help, but there are also plenty of un-nice people who will take what you've got and use it to push you aside.
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Kudos to Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair (Score:4, Funny)
To be fair they wanted to open source the code in Q4 1999, however their Java ftp client just finished loading a few months ago so they couldn't upload the code until just now.
Sun is still screwing up, albeit not as much (Score:4, Interesting)
I appreciate how much effort it must have taken for Sun to move this far on open source. Nevertheless, I think Sun is still screwing up.
Solaris, for example, is being positioned as an alternative to Linux: it's "pick us or pick Linux". From an open source point of view, it would be better if Sun picked a license that allowed the best parts of Solaris and Linux to be combined, and for end users to decide what those best parts are.
For Java, Sun still has most of the control, they have torpedoed attempts to certify Apache-licensed implementations as Java compliant, and their dual licensing scheme for Sun Java means that the project just isn't run the way an open source project ought to be run.
In the short term, Sun's behavior is disruptive for open source, but sadly not in the positive newspeak sense, but in the sense of merely annoying a lot of people for no good reason.
In the long term, Sun is going to lose with Solaris and Java if they persist in their take-it-or-leave-it approach to open source. If they want the technologies to survive in some form, they need to allow a mix-and-match approach; that's what open source is really all about.
Re:Sun is still screwing up, albeit not as much (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very important point. Regardless of any so called technical merit Solaris kernel has over Linux, its NOT going to catch up with Linux in adoption or momentum. At least not anytime in the near future. I am telling this as I have managed to get Solaris(intel version) installed on a machine after about half a dozen failed attempts. Mostly due to hardware incompatibility. The tried hardwares include even the very common ones like DL-385. Just to manage it from my laptop(Kubuntu) I installed OpenSSH on the solaris box. It took almost 30 minutes to get it installed where as in linux it would take less than 30 sec. Solaris is no where near to Linux in hardware compatibility , ease of installation, availability of applications
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meh (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm...
It's alright man. Good to have you with us.
Sun Doesn't Have Much of a Future (Score:5, Insightful)
If they could make Solaris and SPARC stand out and pay off then fine, but they can't hence the half-hearted and pretty sad move to 'open source' Solaris just so all their consultants and execs can run around trying to tell us that it's 'just like Linux'. However, in the cold hard light of day, Linux ate Solaris's lunch, and SPARC just competes too closely with x86 based servers without the comparable performance. SPARC is so inferior to x86 in terms of raw performance it's so laughable. Solaris also suffers from the fact that Sun just don't have the resources to push development to where Linux and other operating systems are, and these days it is increasingly expensive to try and maintain an entire OS yourself.
In terms of open source, Sun's problem is that the vast majority of open source software is written for Linux and the BSDs first. No one thinks of Solaris as their first platform of consideration, and it's difficult to see why they should do so now. It's still like that now, and it was still like that a few years ago when a former employer scratched its head trying to work out why Zope and Python performance was so terrible on Solaris and an UltraSPARC. A Sun guy even recompiled Python in Forte. The bottom line answer we got from the Python devs was "We use open source systems, and possibly Windows, first and foremost on x86 systems, x86 and Linux performs better anyway, and while we'd like to help, we just don't care about your corner case problem on an OS and hardware we don't have access to and can't reproduce. Just use Linux and x86". That's not literal, but it's the general gist, and I couldn't say I blamed them.
The solution? They moved to a far cheaper x86 system with Linux, they had no installation problems with Python as it came within the package management system itself, things were far easier to manage, performance increased exponentially which pleased everyone and Python and Zope ran with no issues whatsoever. That still holds true today.
PJ calls Sun out for "abetting" SCOundrels (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at this post here [groklaw.net] from Groklaw, reviewing the testimony from the SCO v Novell trial.
PJ notes that SCO enacted a license, illegally according to Novell, with Sun in 2003 that allowed Sun to open source Unix Sys V. Knowing they had that, Sun still allowed SCO to embark on their SCOSource campaign against IBM and Linux users for allegedly putting Sys V code into Linux.
Sun has a long way to go.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they screwed up big time. Groklaw has a nice article up on their involvement with SCO:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080625020853732
And they are still screwing up. Just have a look at the legal agreement you need to agree to when downloading even the *specification* from any of the Java Community Process groups where the project lead works for Sun. Evil and completely unacceptable terms for open-source developers...
And in those projects where they have released the source under a free license, they still keep an iron hand on the development process. So unless you work for sun, you need to beg to get your changes in (and sign all sorts of agreements). Closed bug-reporting systems. Version-control repositories that you need to apply to get read-only access to. Closed mailing lists. Design meetings held in person (Sun employees only of course).
This is a company that has a *long* way to go before they understand what Open Source is about.
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system. Yes, once the source is released a fork is then possible, but for a large project inertia and an existing pool of developers all from one company make that something that takes real anger to do. So the changes Sun has made so far don't achieve a whole lot; they still completely control the direction their open-source projects take.
Real OSS companies are different; they contribute upstream, allow derivatives downstream, and are open in their process. A whole world of difference. See RedHat for a good example.
Re:Sun has a long way to go.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence. Or ignorance, in this case.
Sun is a company comprised of over 30k employees. That's a small city's worth of people. Many of those people have been with Sun for a long time, from times before OSS really came on the scene.
People at the top may get it. People at the bottom (i.e. new, younger hires) may get it. The problem is that there are many people in-between who have been doing things the Sun way (indeed, the standard corporate way) for so long that OSS is just alien and bizarre.
There is indeed a lot of internal hostility toward Linux. A lot of it is just sour grapes, but there is also quite a bit of feeling that Solaris is the superior solution, and people are downright baffled that anyone would knowingly choose inferior technology. "If we just showed them the light, they'd use Solaris instead of that Linux crap!"
As with most huge multinationals, the company is made up of several distinct business units. Hardware, Software, Sales, Services, IT, etc. Sales people make money on software sales and support contracts. They also make money on high-margin government and finance sales. What they don't make much money on is bare hardware sales, especially if the customer wants Linux. Unfortunately, what this all means is that the people who use revenue streams to try and shape corporate focus are in a battle with the senior executives who are trying to shift the company away from relying on those high-margins-but-shrinking-buyer-pool revenue sources.
There is also the problem that for many people, a job is a job. They're not particularly interested in keeping up with things outside of their sphere of influence. Change means having to learn new things, and sadly, there is a lot of resistance to change (not just at Sun, of course!)
It will certainly be interesting to see what Sun looks like in 5-10 years, if it still exists as a distinct corporate entity.
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What went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2000-2001
1. They screwed up by announcing the end of line for Solaris on X86
2. They screwed up by refusing to offer X86 hardware.
3. They screwed up by not offering Linux on any of their hardware
4. They screwer up by not open sourcing Java, Solaris, and other goodies.
In the end, they are trying to correct all those errors, but I wonder whether doing that 7-8 years later means that they missed a golden opportunity to become a leader in the Linux and Unix software and hardware market (including on X86).
Re:You know how you can help, Sun? (Score:4, Informative)
you might be asking the wrong company there - as far as i recall, the main jython developer also wrote ironpython, and now works for microsoft who seem to not really take python seriously as its a bit of a bolt-on hack and not nicely integrated into visual studio like c++ etc; they're not exactly the kings of opensource either....
plus, even though the jython library version is out-of-date, it still makes c-python look like a snail - and i never thought i'd say that java is faster than c!
hopefully python3000 will bring us speed if not compatibility.
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Re:still skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
IcedTea is based on OpenJDK, released by Sun.
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Re:still skeptical (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:still skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
They are coerced into behaving nicely by the huge open source community which is not that much interested in what they have to offer anymore and have a lot of influence in the market
Not really. Java still dominates the enterprise application market (the only place it ever made any money for Sun), and its open source status is likely to have little effect on this. Even without ZFS being open-sourced, Solaris would still have a world leading file system. And I don't see where any pressure at all came from for them to open source the design of their UltraSparc T1 and T2 processors [opensparc.net]. Sun have been progressively opening more and more of their key business IP, and as far as I can see the only reason they have done so is that they really believe in the benefits of open source.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[Java]'s a great learning language, like Turing was back in the 80's-90's or so, and it can be used to teach the basics of OOP and OOP compiler design.
Java is a useful language with a well-designed and extensive set of libraries that make it one of the best languages available for implementing most kinds of business applications.
What it isn't, in fact, is a good learning language.
How they EVER planned to make money off java, is beyond me, [well, maybe the embedded versions]. This should have been open-sourc
Re:I think that Sun is doing Open Source fairly we (Score:4, Informative)
I thought that Sun paid a lot of money for StarOffice, and then Sun open sourced it.
Isn't this right?
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